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Comment by m4r35n357 | Hacker News Reader

You keep using that word "communist" . . . etc.

Actually in this case it makes sense, communist theory says workers should only produce what is socially necessary, and so in many cases managers are just there for nothing. However communist theorists like engels also wrote about some industries requiring management, so it's not totally out of the question, but i don't think you'd find many communists saying software is one of those industries.

Which is weird since open source at least has the properties of knowledge belonging to everyone.

Also programmers are the owners of their means of production. Most artists too, but for some reasons they are often paid very badly if they aren't get excessively popular by accident.

I think there were a lot of changes since the beginning of the industrial revolution and if knowledge and abilities increasingly keep being the primary ressource of production, the theory could fit at some point.

The means of production for a programmer is not always as simple as just a computer.

At my last job I wrote a driver for a proprietary framework to talk to closed hardware units, which made lots of money. I could not have done this without the company's license as a developer for the framework, or without the protocol specification for the hardware units. In this case, the company I worked for owned the means of production, not me, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I got a very tiny cut of the fruits of my labour.

No, I was referring to the knowledge you have, not to the device you are currently using. Compared to the beginning of the industrial revolution, where factories could only ever be build by extremely wealthy individuals that could afford the expensive machines, today we have a situation that the hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper and the skill set of workers become the most prominent resource. I would indeed expect your situation becoming more and more rare.

Edit: or maybe not rarer, but the costs of machine and license become smaller compared to your wage.

I concur. Most custom financial software interfaces with systems that a developer could never get access to without the sponsorship of an institution. It’s really, really hard to write good software without a test environment. Mostly because specs and docs are always riddled with errors or omissions, if they exist at all.

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